Helen Charlupski, long-time School Committee member known for pioneering early education and playing a role in nearly every major school renovation in Brookline since the 1990s, ended a 33-year tenure when she was not re-elected in May.
In an interview with Brookline.News, Charlupski said she feels “really pleased” with what she accomplished during her decades of public service in Brookline.
“In some respects I’ve gotten more than I’ve given in the sense of being able to make things better for the schools and for people within the schools,” she said.
Charlupski was recognized at a May 22 School Committee meeting, where dozens of people — including Brookline’s State Representative Tommy Vitolo, Superintendent Linus Guillory and Select Board member Bernard Greene — commended her decades of public service.
“Helen, your fingerprints are on every school, practically — and maybe literally — every classroom, and every child whose path was made a little brighter because of your work,” Guillory said at the meeting.
Karen Shmukler, who is currently Brookline’s interim director of the Office of Student Services and previously spent 11 years as an administrator in the district, praised Charlupski’s work in the district and advocacy at the state level.
“At this time of current turmoil, you singularly asked me incisive questions,” Shmukler said. “You asked for data. You wanted to get to the bottom of what happened — to the truth, to facts. Not to score political points or for personal gain, but because you care so deeply about the Public Schools of Brookline and its reputation.”
Charlupski said she believes her loss in May’s election was due to an amalgamation of factors, including frustration among voters — toward the School Committee, but also more broadly.
“After 33 years I’ve taken votes that haven’t been popular with some people, and people remember,” she said. “But, I’m okay. I got re-elected 11 times and didn’t get re-elected once.”
A social worker’s approach to school policy
Charlupski moved to Brookline 1979, working as an outpatient psychiatric social worker with Spanish-speaking patients at Boston Children’s Hospital. Before that, she was a medical social worker at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem.
Her career in social work shaped her time on School Committee — both in the things she wanted to accomplish for students and in her relationships with colleagues, she said.
“It’s helped me to understand people, sometimes people who I disagreed with, and it helped me to think about ways to bring people together,” Charlupski said.
She became involved in Brookline’s schools as the Brookline High School PTO President from 1990 to 1991 and ran in a five-person race for three open seats on the School Committee in 1992.
After that, she was re-elected every three years until 2025.
During Charlupski’s first year on the School Committee, she was mostly quiet — listening and collecting information, she said. Over the next three decades, she became a mentor and wealth of historical knowledge, her colleagues said.
“She is Miss School Committee,” said Suzanne Federspiel, a School Committee member who was elected in 2017, in an interview with Brookline.News. “She mentored many, many of us as we came on board, and she has continued to do that.”
Charlupski quickly assumed a role as an early education advocate in Brookline and has been instrumental in expanding the town’s kindergarten and pre-kindergarten offerings. From 1995 to 2007, she served at the state level on a newly formed early childhood advisory council, where she worked to obtain grants to help Brookline transition to full-day kindergarten.
At the time, kindergarten in Brookline lasted just three hours a day. Navigating a mix of excitement from families and pushback from educators, Charlupski advocated for “transition grants,” which brought free, full-day kindergarten to town in 2000 for the first time.
“It was really important for kids, for families, I think for teachers, too in the end,” she said.
William Lupini, who served as superintendent of the district from 2004 to 2015, said Charlupski was instrumental in launching and growing early education in Brookline.
“There wasn’t a thing that happened revolving around that program or those students that Helen wasn’t an active participant in, showing up to support parents, kids, staff,” Lupini said in an interview.
A champion for school rebuilding projects
In 1994, Charlupski was involved with a renovation of the then-Heath School, now called the Hayes School. The project sparked a fascination for architecture that would later earn her the nickname “Miss Capital.”
Over the next 28 years, Charlupski played a role in renovations at Brookline High School as well as the Baker, Lawrence, Runkle, Ridley and Driscoll schools. She also championed the Pierce School renovation, a controversial demolition and rebuild of a K-8 school that is now projected to finish on-time and under budget, according to Charlupski and other town authorities.
The projects challenged Charlupski to learn something new and to continue adapting over the decades, particularly as sustainability became a central focus for the town, she said.
“It was a field I didn’t know a lot about, but it interested me to the point where now I’m an architect wannabe,” Charlupski said. “I think the schools have done more than any other town building to improve our climate resilience.”
Challenges
Charlupski’s time on the School Committee was not free of problems, nor controversy. Since the passage of Proposition 2 ½ — which restricts the ability of cities and towns in Massachusetts to increase their property taxes on an annual basis beyond a certain amount — structural budget deficits have persisted in Brookline, challenging the School Committee to make millions of dollars in budget cuts.
But the impacts of unexpected global and national events also find their way to Brookline, Charlupski said: tragedies like the mass shooting at Columbine High School, Sept. 11, 2001, and the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict on Oct. 7, 2023.
“There are perennial issues that you need to deal with, and those are hard,” Charlupski said. “But every year there’s something that will happen. You don’t know what it’s going to be, but something will happen and throw everything off course.”
The town has also changed over the course of Charlupski’s tenure. In the 1993-94 school year, 5,930 students attended Brookline schools, according to data from the state. Of those students, 1,652 attended BHS.
In the 2024-25 school year, more than 7,000 students were in Brookline schools, with the high school population increasing by more than 500 students since the 1990s, according to state data.
Parent involvement has been high “from the beginning,” Charlupski said, but social media has given rise to “echo chambers” that platform the loudest voices, not the majority of people. She has noticed a change in the way the community interacts with itself, she said.
“That’s a problem,” she said. “There isn’t that face to face interaction.”
Charlupski’s departure comes at a time of significant turnover on the School Committee, which has gained five new members in the past two elections, as well as in district leadership. In the past six months, three high-level administrators, including the district’s superintendent, have resigned or announced plans to leave the district at the end of the school year.
The loss of Charlupski on the School Committee is not only the end of a celebrated, decades-long career of public service, Lupini said, but an indication of change throughout the district.
“There aren’t going to be many more Helen Charlpuskis,” Lupini said.